Five months ago Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art crowned its notable
1936-3 7 season with a comprehensive exhibit of the very latest artistic
wrinkle, Surrealism. With a vertiginous backward leap 200 centuries into
the Fourth Ice Age, the Museum last week wound up its season by presenting
an extraordinary collection of Prehistoric Rock Pictures. Director Alfred Barr Jr. saw
no paradox. He recalled that many cave decorations were magic symbols
to help the painter with his hunting, and thus “today walls are painted
so that the artist may eat,” whereas “in prehistoric times walls were
painted so that the community might eat.” Nevertheless, said he: “The
formal elegance of the Altamira bison; the grandeur of outline in the
Norwegian rock engravings of bear, elk and whale; the cornucopian
fecundity of Rhodesian animal landscapes; the kinetic fury of the
East Spanish huntsmen; the spontaneous ease with which the South
African draftsmen mastered the difficult silhouets of moving
creatures: these are achievements which living artists and many others
who are interested in living art have admired.” What surprised even the best-informed artists and connoisseurs, as they
made their way past a great collection of full-scale water color and
photographic reproductions which filled three floors, was the sheer
bulk of artistic material retrieved from the depths of the human past.
Yet the Museum's exhibition was only a fractional facsimile of the
3,500 items in the Frobenius Collection at the Institute for the Study
of the Morphology of Civilization, Frankfurtam-Main, Germany. The Frobenius collection is one more example of the productive
possibilities of the single-track mind. In 1886, when Leo Frobenius was
a small Berliner of 13, he had made up his mind he was going to be an
anthropologist. At 15 he had become such an expert on the American
Indian that he amused himself compiling technical errors in the
Leather Stocking Tales. He wrote a dissertation on the ethnographic
significance of Marco Polo's travels. Before he was 20 he had had to
work as a farmer and clerk, but by the time he came of age he had
hammered his way onto the staff of the Bremen Museum.
